Sons of the Forest wasn’t really on my radar. I never played the first game, The Forest, because it didn’t seem like my game then. After the launch of Sons of the Forest, I started watching others playing the game a little bit at a time, and it sold me on it. I knew my brother wanted was interested in it too, so we made the pack to play the game together.
We start off with a helicopter ride to search for a millionaire and his family on some remote island. A helicopter crash ensues, and now you’re stranded out on a snowy mountaintop with an arguably good amount of starting supplies and a deaf best friend named Kelvin.
Right away I knew a few of the keyboard commands to start opening up inventory and some important things to craft like a spear and a torch. I was happy I watched a little bit of an Achievement Hunter Let’s Play because the game doesn’t really give a ton of help on learning some stuff. After my brother and I explored a cave with some skeletons nearby, we made our trek down the mountain.
The forest area is super dense, so when we started having island inhabitants coming at us, we didn’t see them coming. Luckily it was pretty easy to push them away, or just outright kill them. I knew that you could cook these guys and eat them, but man was that a last-resort situation for me. I don’t know how it affects the player or the game to be a cannibal, but I wasn’t too keen to find out. So we hunted squirrels and rabbits as much as we could.
We made our way to a blip that was on our radar map thing. Incredibly helpful, by the way. Seems like it’s a new addition to this game, and I’m happy about it. We found a man who looked like may have been in our helicopter search party at one point, but he had seemingly hung himself. Why? I really don’t know, but he had some useful stuff that we snagged.
At this point, nothing had been too terrifying. I did scream at one point when a dude came out of nowhere and surprised me, but other than that we seemed to be doing just fine. We were looking for a good spot to set up a proper camp, but for the time being, we decided to sleep next to the dude that hung himself. Don’t worry, we cut him down.
This is where we messed up. We went to bed way too early. When we woke up, our fire was out, and it was pitch black out. We scrambled to get our torches out, not wanting to use the precious batteries to the flashlight we got. We stayed quiet and listened to bushes moving, little yelps and murmurs from the forest. We could hear them above up on the ledge, moving around. It was scary as hell, just waiting for something to pounce on us. Finally, light began to show as the sunrise had finally come. We sprinted to the river we had been following, ate some energy bars, and drank some water. Nothing seemed to of followed us, but we couldn’t be sure about that.
On our way to what looked like a giant lake on the map, we encountered a woman. No, not the woman you’ve probably seen in the trailers, with the extra leg and arm. No, this woman looked entirely normal. She had on a ripped-up white shirt and shorts. She wasn’t grey or had any markings or anything on her. It was weird to see, but I slowly made my way toward her. Then I heard the growl come from her, her face scrunched up into an aggressive sneer, and she made the cutting-throat motion. I told Eric not to kill her, but just watch to see what she does. She wasn’t attacking at first until we realized we were getting surrounded by others. These guys looked like normal cannibal guys, so we knew she was with them instantly. They swarmed us, and we defended, pushing them back, taking them out one by one. Then we heard a yell. A really loud yell, and saw a huge brute making his way down a small hill toward us. This guy had on a golden mask and was easily 2 feet taller than us.
Runs and plays well, crafting is a learning curve. Also, big guy bodied both of us.
@SirKingEric
I was the first to fall. My health was low to begin with, but with a single kick from him, I was on the ground. Eric tried to get me up, but he fell quickly to this giant beast of a man. I was bummed. Our respawn point would be all the way back to the once-hanging dead man. I hit the respawn button, and to my surprise, I woke up a couple feet off the ground. I’m tied to a stake in a small encampment. I see a small cannibal walking around the camp, and Eric is hanging 20ft away from me. I pull out my knife and cut myself down, stupidly without a plan. I rush the cannibal with just my knife and together Eric and I take him down. We find out supplies in backpacks near a fire with some bodies burning, or maybe cooking. We search the camp for more supplies and actually find some good stuff.
Unfortunately, I think we took too long. Surprise, the golden mask brute shows back up and starts beating our asses again. I fell several times, with Eric drawing him away and circling back to pick me up. Eventually, we just said fuck it and ran away as soon as we could. We had finally made it to the giant lake we were making our way to. Nearby was actually a down helicopter. It must’ve been there for a long time because the four men inside it were skeletons. We found more supplies and surveyed the area. We were close to water, and we had a bit of a hill and ledge where the helicopter was sitting. It honestly didn’t seem like a bad place to set up a small defensive camp. So we got to work. I told Kelvin, who has been with us this entire time, to start clearing out trees so we can start building walls and a small cabin. By the time we ended up logging off, our little area was almost entirely cleared of trees, our wall was halfway up, and the cabin was missing a wall or two, but it was a great start for us.
We still never actually ate people yet, but we did cook some body parts just to see what it would look like and all that. If we could get bones from them or something but didn’t seem like it. Maybe we need to cook them longer, I’m not sure yet, more experimenting will need to be done.
From a technical standpoint, Sons of the Forest doesn’t hold your hand. There is a book you can search through that will show you how to build a fire, a cabin, walls, that sort of stuff, but it doesn’t explicitly tell you any of this. There’s a bit of a learning curve. Especially figuring out key bindings and stuff. Took us a little while, but we got it down eventually.
I had a great, short session playing this game with my brother. I think playing it with friends is the best way to go, for obvious reasons, but there is also a peaceful mode, so if you want to start out easy just to get your bearings and understand the mechanics, that’s not a bad way to go either!
I’m hoping to do more updates while we continue to play this game, and hopefully, we can have some more crazy stories!
The Tired Obsidian 
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